Northwest Voices | Letters to the Editor

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Washington state vanity plates subject to complaints

Fred Talbot, at his Sammamish home, with his truck that has a personalized license plate that says "ELKNUT." Talbot was denied the plate at first, but appealed and won.

Personalized-plate law used to generated revenue

I think the way the people were treated in the Feb. 4 article “Vanity plates: Some take too much license,” [page one] is a crime. It’s third-degree B.S.! This is just as bad as in the 1990s when the National Basketball Association was forced to change the name of the team the “Bullets” to the “Wizards.” Sounds like this is a ploy for our state’s politicians and the Department of Licensing (DOL) to collect more revenue.

If the drivers are forced to change plates then they must pay for new ones. If this keeps up then there’s going to be a new law banning all vanity plates and that will give the DOL a reason to raise rates for regular plates to make up for lost revenue that is generated when people pay extra for vanity plates.

If any of those people mentioned in that article or anyone else out there feels they’ve been wrongfully stereotyped about their vanity plate(s) and they want to start a petition to dispute it, then I’ll definitely sign it. What’s next? Are we going to get cited and/or stereotyped for our vanity license plate frames and bumper stickers too? Like Lisa Kleiner said in the article “What happened to freedom of speech?” All those people should get a lawyer to exercise the grandfather clause.